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Events

Visiting Scholars Lecture Series: 2004

Fall 2004

Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D. Dreaming & Religion
in a War-Torn World

This presentation considers the role
of dreaming in the worlds religious and spiritual traditions, with
special attention to issues of conflict, violence, and war. Throughout
history dreams have played a vital role in the worlds major religious
traditions (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) and have also been central
in the spiritual lives of the indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa, Australia,
and the Americas. While much is known about dreams in relation to healing,
prophecy, and creativity, less is known about their connection to violence,
strife, and the darker dimensions of the psyche Jung termed the
shadow. This presentation argues that dreaming offers a valuable
resource not only for understanding the innate human propensity to violence
but also for transforming that propensity in the service of a more constructive
and life-affirming future.

Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., earned his doctorate
in Religion and Psychological Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity
School, and is now a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union
and a faculty member in the Dream Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University.
A former President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams,
he is author of several books, including Dreams of Healing, Visions
of the Night, and An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming.

Jacqueline Thurston, M.A. The Shadow & Spirit Within the Image

Through works of art, we explore the quest to
integrate the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and
idea with the inescapable tangible realities of the external world. This
presentation explores the potential for a work of art, and the act of
art making itself, to become a symbolic container for the artist´s experience
of mastering and integrating a powerful loss, or a series of losses. This
human task integrates experiences of loss with transcendent visions of
hope and lies at the very heart of the creative process. Each artist presented,
working in a different medium, searched for, and found, ../i that provided
symbolic containers for their experience. The artists have been selected
in part because the very medium in which they chose to work served as
a metaphor for the symbolic nature of their experiences.

Jacqueline Thurston, M.A., is an artist,
writer, performance poet and Professor of Art at San Jose State University.
Twice the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her
work is in major national and international collections including the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Carnegie Museum, The Library of
Congress, The International Museum of Photography, The Oakland Museum,
and the Bibliotheque Nationale. She has appeared as a performance poet
at the Ensemble for New Music and the Center for Computer Research in
Music and Acoustics at Stanford University.

John Beebe, M.D. Psychological Types

Jung´s theory of psychological types has reached
the wider public through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is used
in career counseling, team building in corporate settings, teacher training,
and even the construction of characters by Hollywood screenwriters. Few
psychologists, however, know how to make typological assessments while
working with clients in their offices, without resorting to giving them
a self-assessment test. Fewer still know how to use the theory of types
to guide their understanding of the process of dynamic psychotherapy,
which had been Jung´s original intention in making this contribution.
This seminar will show how this theory can be used in clinical work.
Suggested background reading: Lectures on Jung´s Typology, by Marie
Louise von Franz and James Hillman, available from Spring Publications.

John Beebe, M.D., is a Jungian analyst,
the Founding Editor of The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal,
and a past co-editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. He
is the author of numerous articles on the anima, film, psychological types,
and analysis; an editor of volumes on analytic treatment, and the masculine;
and the author of Integrity in Depth; and Terror, Violence,
and the Impulse to Destroy. He practices in San Francisco and is a
past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

Spring 2004

Jurgen Kremer, Ph.D. Healing Stories from our
Ancestors

In indigenous traditions healing, creation
myth, ancestry, and place are often interlinked. In the Din (Navajo) tradition
healing occurs when people put themselves back to their center of creation
and rework their lives from this point of balance and well-being. This
happens in the several-days-long chantway ceremonies when a patient sits
in the middle of a sandpainting and is sung over. Indigenous
understanding suggests that remembering ones ancestry or ancestries,
and their mythic stories, is crucial for healing.

In this seminar we explore the transformative
power of remembering ancestral connections through storytelling, visualization,
and ritual. I use an ethnoautobiographical approach to explore the significance
of ancestry for personal and cultural healing, using the example of my
Germanic ancestry. Pushing remembrance back to our own indigenous connections
is foundational work for an imagination that enables us to heal fractured
stories and envision a connection to mythic stories that is not appropriative
but instead decolonizing. We need to connect to the earths secrets
and riches by quietly observing and listening to the spirits of our ancestors
and the spirits of place. In this way we enter a dialogue that nurtures
all our relatives and releases the suffering we carry. Our spiritual and
psychological challenge is to re-imagine ourselves with the ancestral
stories we carry, as part of the landscape we live in, and its history.

Jurgen W. Kremer, Ph.D., Diplompsychologe,
is an Executive Editor of ReVision, and author of Towards a
person-centered resolution of intercultural conflicts. He is former
Dean of Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Saybrook Institute;
Academic Dean, Integral Studies Program, East-West Psychology Program,
California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS); and Co-Director of the
Ph.D. program for Traditional Knowledge, CIIS. He has edited ReVision
special issues on Peace and Identity; Paradigmatic Challenges; Culture
and Ways of Knowing; Indigenous Science; Trance and Healing; and Transformative
Learning.

Meredith Sabini, Ph.D. Field of Dreams

Dreams offer a portal to the whole range
of human experience. This seminar covers areas of healing in the field
of dreams, including Asklepian healing traditions; culture dreams
and Native American attitudes toward dreams; objective dreams and the
dreaming mind as an information source; and an evolutionary approach to
dreams.

Ancient Asklepian and Hippocratic healing
traditions included both doctors and patients dreams; modern
versions of these rites and current findings on dreams of illness are
discussed. Culture dreams, including the prophetic dreams
of Black Elk and C. G. Jung, as well as contemporary examples of dreams
about 9/11 and the environmental crisis, are discussed. We compare our
cultures avoidant attitude toward dreams with that of the Lenape,
Iroquois, and Algonkian, where dreams wove into all aspects of societal
functioning.

Jung spoke of objective dreams;
he also stated that our evolutionary heritage reveals itself in the dreaming
mind. The Taoist shamans Rainmaker story offers a model for applying
a depth psychological approach to environmental and sociopolitical dilemmas.
Could we use dreams to gain information and insight into the high rate
of breast cancer in Marin County, for example? Recent evidence from neuropsychology
and evolutionary psychiatry shows that basic dream themes like falling,
being chased, and taking a test correspond to ancient survival patterns.
Psychiatrist Anthony Stevens and human ecologist Paul Shepard have suggested
that our dreaming mind, now dated at 142 million years, may offer vitally
important guidance through this risky period in our species survival.

Meredith Sabini, M.A., Ph.D., is a licensed
psychologist practicing in the field since 1972. She is author of The
earth has a soul: The nature writings of C. G. Jung, and numerous
articles on depth psychology. She is the founder of The Dream Institute
of Northern California, in Berkeley.

David Tresan, M.D. In the Service of the Natural

Both Freud and Jung start with and then
leave the primitive mind behind in the construction of their theories
of consciousness. Neither would aver, though, that the primitive no longer
resides within us, but because they both portray natural man (and woman)
as so elemental and archaic, we are hard put to recognize him or her in
us except in a stereotyped and demeaningly inferior way. For both Freud
and Jung, the primitive is portrayed primarily as the Paleolithic while
the more recent Neolithic, bronze, and iron age human is overlooked.

History tells us that the real story
reads otherwise. Natural man and woman, far from only carrying a club
or a suckling baby and being garbed in loincloth, gave rise in antiquity
to societies and cultures that stand among the most remarkable achievements
in the history of humankind. These ancestors still dwell within us and
among us, often unrecognized in their ways, and they routinely bring their
problems to therapy and analysis. What represents healing for these ubiquitous
primitive and not so primitive psyches and aspects of psyches? Is a healed
Neanderthal still a Neanderthal, an early Minoan still a Cretan, an ancient
Mesopotamian a paradigm for a modern Self in psychotic process, an heroic
Homeric man a present-day ever warring egotist? How do such minds think?
Is this us?

This talk is part of a work in progress
that ranges from psychological considerations of the natural to the transcendent.
The pole of interest for this seminar lies in the direction of the former,
and exploration together will hopefully shed some light on the earlier
phylogenetic levels of development and also provide a deeper and broader
context for the individual work we do in the name of psychotherapy and
analysis.

David I. Tresan, M.D., is a Jungian analyst
in private practice in Mill Valley and San Francisco. His abiding interest
lies in the history of ideas and science, the evolution of consciousness,
the psychology of the transcendent, and, most importantly, clinical work.
He has recently written on religion, neuroscience, and aging in various
reviews and papers. A presentation in April, 2003, entitled This New
Science of Ours; A More or Less Systematic History of Consciousness and
Transcendence, will appear in 2004 in two parts in the spring and
summer editions of the Journal of Analytic Psychology.